a Greek poet, was born at Corycia or Anazarba, in Cilicia, towards the close of the reign of Marcus Aurelius. His father, Agesilaus, held a distinguished rank in the senate of his native place, not so much on account of his birth or his riches, as the credit he obtained for the extent of his knowledge and his love of philosophy, which was the object of all his studies, and the guide of all his actions. To his son he was careful to give an education conformable to his own principles, causing him to be instructed in music, geometry, and particularly the belles-lettres. The young Oppian, however, had scarcely completed his studies, when an unlooked-for reverse damped his ardour, and destroyed all his hopes. Septimius Severus not easy, however, to reconcile so much praise bestowed on the one hand, and so little regard evinced for the works of Oppian on the other; nor can we help feeling some astonishment, when we consider that, from the date of the editio princeps, printed at Florence in 1515, two centuries elapsed before the appearance of the first really critical edition, published by Schneider in the year 1777. During this long period, it is true, there appeared several editions at considerable intervals, particularly that of Aldus, Venice, 1517, which Schneider considers as very defective, and regards as the source of all the faults which, till his time, had disfigured the text; that of Vascosan, Paris, 1549; and that of Rittershusius, Leyden, 1597. No edition appeared in the seventeenth, nor any in the eighteenth century, until the year 1777, when that of Schneider was published at Strasbourg, containing the Greek text, accompanied with a Latin translation, and followed by the paraphrase in prose which the sophist Eutechinus had made of the Ixetica, another poem attributed to Oppian, but which, unfortunately, has not come down to our time. This was followed by the edition of Belin de Ballu, published at Strasbourg in 1786, but containing only the Cynegetica, of which the editor published, at the same place, the following year, a good French translation, enriched with critical notes, and a curious extract from El Domai's history of animals, translated from the Arabic by Baron Silvestre de Sacy, who, however, for some reason, withheld his name. Prior to this there were two French translations, one by Florent Christian, preceptor to Henry IV., when prince of Bearn; and another by Fermat, a counsellor of Toulouse, who, in 1690, published a prose version of the books on Hunting by Arrian and Oppian. The poem on Fishing was translated into English heroic verse by Jones and others, belonging to St John's College, Oxford, and printed there in 1722, 8vo, with a life of the author prefixed. The Latin translation of Lorenzo Lippi, printed in 1478, preceded by thirty-seven years the editio princeps of the Greek text.